Irrigated agriculture is placing increasing pressure on finite freshwater resources, especially in developing countries, where water extraction is often unregulated, un-priced and even subsidized. To shift agriculture to a more sustainable use of water without harming the food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholders, substantial improvements of water use efficiency will be required.

The Indian dream should not be about 'some Indians' doing well, but 'India' doing well. Making high technology work for the rich is easy. Can Indian scientists make high technology work for the poor? (Editorial)

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Bank filtration (BF) has emerged as an economical and sustainable water pre-treatment technology for drinking water supply. In this method, subsurface water of a water body moves into the well by seepage. BF wells adjacent to a river or lake pump the stored groundwater abstracted from the surface through aquifers. Chemical and biological contaminants such as turbidity, microbes, dissolved chemicals and natural organics are removed by the channel of aquifers present in the area.

Disputes over intellectual property rights can delay the spread of clean technologies to the developing world, but they are not wholly to blame.

Analysis of the features attributed to grassroots innovation shows them to be common to all innovations whether in rural, industrializing or industrial locations and does not justify splitting innovation into one with the suffix ‘grassroots’ and another without it as done in India’s current innovation policy. Examples and experience from industrialized countries bring out that innovation policies should adopt an integrated approach for all innovations irrespective of the location or process they emerge from.

On 15 July, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi hosted a group of professionals working on rural housing in diverse geographies of the country. The agenda for the meeting, which was co-hosted by several partners, was to present a portal built for the rural housing sector (www.ruralhousingnetwork.com) and to get feedback before the portal goes live in a month.